Why? Because “We worry, when people are running an operating system that’s 10 years old, that the next printer they buy isn’t going to work well, or they buy a new game, they buy Fallout 4, a very popular game, and it doesn’t work on a bunch of older machines,” Capossela stated. “And so, as we are pushing our ISV [independent software vendor] and hardware partners to build great new stuff that takes advantage of Windows 10 that obviously makes the old stuff really bad and not to mention viruses and security problems.”

Besides, if security is really a concern, what the heck are you doing running Windows of any generation? Windows security isn’t as crappy as it used to be, but it’s still junk. If you want security, use my favorite desktop, Linux Mint or even Apple’s OS X El Capitan. Windows? Forget about it.

You see, even those “supported” PCs will get support only until July 17, 2017. After that date, only the “most critical” patches will be provided, and then only when they don’t “risk the reliability or compatibility” of the older editions.

In other words, Microsoft isn’t promising any real support for Windows 7 or 8.1 on Skylake after midsummer 2017. What enterprise in its right mind is going to buy PCs without a guarantee they’ll be supported?

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has been writing about technology and the business of technology since CP/M-80 was the cutting-edge PC operating system, 300bps was a fast Internet connection, WordStar was the state-of-the-art word processor, and we liked it!